1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for producing, controlling and displaying menus that combine radial marking menus and linear menus and, more particularly, to a system that combines a pattern selectable menu with a location selectable menu into a single display.
2. Description of the Related Art
Menus selection in modern user interfaces is a fundamental and frequently used operation. In general, the length of time it takes to select from a menu is small (seconds or fractions of second). However, because menu selection is a high frequency operation in some types of applications, reducing the time involved in selecting from a menu can result in significant time savings in the overall time it takes to accomplish a larger task. It is for this very reason that menu selection speed up ("accelerator") techniques like "hot keys" and marking menus are popular.
Each accelerator technique has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, hot keys can select from a large set of menu items, for example, every key on the keyboard can be used as hot key. However, this is at the cost of the user remembering the associations between menu items and keys. Hot keys are also not effective if a user is working on a system that does not include a keyboard or the user must move between the keyboard and another device while operating the interface. For example, the user may have to move the same hand from a mouse, to the keyboard, and then back to the mouse.
Marking menus is a pop up menu technology that displays menu items in a circle, around the cursor whereas traditional menus (linear menus) display menu items in a linear fashion, for example, from top to bottom. Because of this difference, item selection can be performed more rapidly with marking menus than with linear menus. For example, a user can select from marking menus by "flicking" or making a stroke of the cursor in the direction of a desired menu item. Thus, the user does not have to wait for the menu to be displayed to select from it. However, as the number of items in a marking menu increases, rapid selection without popping up the menu becomes difficult because the angular difference between menu items becomes small and difficult for the user to articulate. To combat this problem, the number of items in a marking menus is generally limited to eight or less.
What is needed is a combination of a radial marking menu and a linear menu in the same display such that the number of items in the menu can be increased beyond eight items while still permitting rapid selection for the items of the marking menu using a marking or stroke pattern and selection of the items of the linear menu using a locational method.